From Gary Numan's "Cars" and Vangelis's Blade Runner soundtrack, to intricate progressive rock solos and a revolution on the dance floor, the synthesizer's place in music history is secure. Today's Google doodle celebrating the birthday of synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog (rhymes with "vogue") is particularly brilliant: It's essentially a working virtual Minimoog, even if severely cut down. The doodle also comes with a four-track recorder. (The various knobs and switches aren't labeled, but Moog Music's website offers a clear guide on how it works, if you're interested.)

Beginnings of Synthesized Sound While the synthesizer is a simple but beautiful concept itself, electronic instruments existed for several decades before it. The theremin was an early example: First patented in 1928, it graced countless 1950s sci-fi movie soundtracks, not to mention thousands of records since then. People associate The Beach Boy's "Good Vibrations" with the theremin, but the sound heard on the record was actually from a slightly different instrument called a Tannerin. Some avant garde mid-century composers also used the tape recorder as an instrument as early as the 1940s, for composing electroacoustic music and musique concrète.

Bob Moog's modular synthesizer was different. He began demonstrating early versions of it in the mid 1960s, though it first entered the public's consciousness with Wendy Carlos's 1968 album Switched-On Bach. Bob Moog met Wendy Carlos in 1967 via the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where I was lucky enough to take several computer music classes 25 years later (on NeXT machines, of all things). While modular synths weren't as large as older, vacuum tube-based synthesizers—like the RCA Mark II, which still resides at the renamed Computer Music Center on 125th St. in Manhattan and takes up an entire room—they were still relatively massive beasts that required cables to patch together the various components.

It took hardwiring and some shrewd packaging for Moog to create a streamlined (for its time), portable version called the Minimoog, the wood-paneled analog synth that spawned a sound heard in several generations of music across multiple genres.

Deceptively Brilliant DesignTo the uninitiated, the Minimoog's front panel still looks somewhat imposing. But it actually serves as an awesome basic tutorial on how a synthesizer works. There are three main sections: the signal generators, which include three voltage-controlled oscillators and pink and white noise generators; the voltage-controlled filter, which lets you add resonance and harmonics to the sound; and the voltage-controlled amplifier, which increases the gain and lets you shape the resulting sound's attack and release parameters. By tweaking the Minimoog's various knobs, you can change the shape of the sound in almost any way imaginable.

The Minimoog itself is monophonic, meaning you can only play one note at a time. Not only that, but it had zero user memory. If you wanted a new sound, you'd lose the first one as you began changing all of the knobs. Taking detailed notes with pen, paper, and masking tape proved quite handy—or, if you were independently wealthy, you could buy several Minimoogs and set each one up to generate a specific sound. (This happened a lot in the 1970s.)

Later synthesizers were polyphonic, and included different configurations of oscillators and different types of filters. Many lower-priced versions lacked the Minimoog's fat sound, though high-end manufacturers like Sequential Circuits, ARP, Roland, Korg, Oberheim, Yamaha, and others delivered equally impressive synthesizers that made their own mark on the music landscape. For example, Vangelis actually used a Yamaha CS-80 for Blade Runner's signature, synthesized brass sound, although the Minimoog is also featured in the soundtrack.

While early music critics panned—and in some cases, ultimately feared—the synthesizer's ability to emulate "real" instruments, realistic sounding versions didn't really arrive until much later, once samplers hit the scene and memory chips became cheap and plentiful. Yet to this day, actual violin and oboe players still exist, despite the ultra-realistic sampled versions available. And the synthesizer itself is rightly regarded as an instrument all its own.

Moog's Legacy TodayToday, with nothing but your regular computer and some software, you can play the virtual equivalent of a Moog synthesizer. In fact, you can play many of them simultaneously. What used to take a rack of hardware synthesizers and a stage crew can now be done on the cheap, or even for free, "inside the box." The most accurate plug-in remains the Arturia Minimoog V ($249), and for the modular version, the Arturia Moog Modular V ($249), both of which are fairly expensive, but there are countless others—including Moog Music's own Animoog (for iPad), which is normally $30 but is available for just $10 through the end of May.

And what of Moog Music, the company Bob Moog created? Although Moog sadly passed away in 2005 at age 71 after an extended illness, the company lives on and thrives selling several lines of virtual analog hardware synthesizers, Taurus bass pedals, and other products. Even though Moog didn't invent the Theremin, it sell a Theremin kit, too. Moog Music even sells a near-identical, $2,695 version of the Minimoog today called the Minimoog Old School (pictured, top), although you can bet this digitally controlled version stays in tune much more easily.

Bob Moog's own legacy will never be overshadowed, though, and his place at the intersection of electronics, music, and computers will always be remembered.

Jamie Lendino is the Editor-in-Chief of ExtremeTech.com, and has written for PCMag.com and the print magazine since 2005. Recently, Jamie ran the consumer electronics and mobile teams at PCMag, and before that, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Smart Device Central, PCMag's dedicated smartphone site, for its entire three-year run from 2006 to 2009. Prior to PCMag, he was a contributing editor for Laptop and mediabistro.com. His writing has also been published in Popular Science, Consumer Reports, Electronic Musician, and Sound and Vision, as well as...
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